Caelan Merlock
Caelan Merlock, commonly derisively called The Lynx, is a major character in the first, second, third, fourth and fifth seasons. He is a savage barbarian and a cruel misanthrope who is obsessed with the hatred he has for his siblings and his father for the cruelty they have shown him his entire life. The sixth son of Tytos Merlock, he has been permanently embittered against society for their discrimination of him. History Caelan Merlock was the sixth-born child and third son of Lord Tytos Merlock in the family castle of Greenguard in the Riverlands. He was born with a number of deformities, namely his long elf-like ears, six fingers on each hand and a head that was slightly disproportionate to his body. Caelan's three sisters and two brothers immediately supplanted him from their lives, even when he was an infant, and talk about his deformity spread from the castle like an infection. Caelan lived an extremely isolated and extricated life, constantly held at arm's length from his family, except for his mother - the only one to show him any compassion. When he was seven, she gave him a black hound which he named Shadow. His mother died when he was nine and he was left at the mercy of his remaining family. He was bullied inconsistently by his brothers and sisters - his brothers once challenged him to climb a waterfall, and then pushed him off and he nearly drowned. Shadow rescued him from the pool. Also, when he was twelve, his sisters gifted him a longbow, and then used him for target practice with his own name-day present. They hunted him for hours, at one point narrowly missing his head and leaving a jagged scar along his cheek that stayed there for the rest of his life. He ended up hating his family, especially his father who covered up every single incident, claiming that the scar was in fact a hunting accident - seeing the irony and derision in that claim, Caelan became permanently embittered against them. When he was seventeen, he humiliated his brothers by hiding a live wolverine under the table whilst they were trying to court a group of girls. The wolverine injured one of the girls and caused a villagewide rampage, while Caelan watched from the castle, but he didn't smile when he saw the chaos. One of his brothers, Brynden, confronted him and, after a struggle, Brynden fell through a tower window into a river. His body was recovered several weeks later and Caelan was never implicated in his brother's death. However, his siblings became extremely wary of him, even frightened, but they didn't consider him well enough to believe he was a threat to them. Season 1 Appearance and Personality Caelan was hideous and not especially tall, but he was built like a stag, with a stocky, compact body, muscular legs, and arms that were netted with muscles. He was bald, with extremely prominent and sharp ears, and had been so his entire life, but his eyes were distinctively yellow as a result of an attempt to poison him by his father. He is almost lipless, and his teeth are filed to points. He wears chain mail with his own sigil - a red buffalo on a green field against a black sky - on his chest, and wields a steel sword and chain. Caelan has a jagged scar running from his right ear to the right edge of his lips, a relic of when his sisters used him for target practice when he was eleven. Caelan was a savage and shamalessly brutal man with a complete lack of remorse, restraint or lenience, consequently capable of unimaginable savagery. He was entirely devoid of happiness truly, since any opportunity for such a thing was robbed of him unhealthily early in his life. As a result, an already unstable man descended into a pitiless barbarian. Caelan was a vicious sadist who shamelessly admitted that he ennjoyed killing and hurting others in any conceivable way possible, simply on the basis that he had been treated the exact same way for his deformity. On the outside, Caelan was frightening to others because of his appearance and actions, but in reality he loathed the fact that people evaded him publicly because he was ugly. He was extremely jealous of his brothers and issters for all being strikingly beautiful and especially accepted by society, whilst he himself has never been accepted as such. Not only that, but the fact that his siblings savagely bullied him as a child, leaving him physically and emotionally scarred. Caelan is extremely bitter towards his siblings for this reason and is driven eventually to killing them. Though considered avaricious, Caelan doesn't seek money in the gang, rather seeking the chance to vent his perpetual rage by killing people. He has never smiled properly in his life and this leads to the assumption that he is not normal. Caelan has a deep-rooted hatred for highborn folk, hypocritically, and is convinced that ultimately all such people are like his brothers and sisters. He is quick to remind people of considerable status that they feel like killing or hurting those who are beneath them. They are unable to object to this because he has a point. Where relationships are concerned, Caelan has no stable relationship with any of his siblings for obvious reasons. His father's apathy and mistreatment his entire life made Caelan hateful towards him, whereas he is hinted to have had a good relationship with his mother, who was the only human being to show him compassion, and the fact that she died when he was young meant that he could no longer cling on to her kindness like he once had. With his won son, Caelan ensured that the boy was made entirely aware of the world's savagery, never truly having a parental relationship with him, leading to the boy hating and fearing Caelan. When faced in combat, Caelan was truly frightening, taking on an entire encampment of soldiers on his own and killing them all, though he was repeatedly injured. He immerses himself in fury when he fights, and also shows incredible savagery whenever he has a weapon in his hand: shuddering uncontrollably whilst aiming a bow during a manhunt, even prolonging his father's death enough to taunt and rage at him for the years of abuse and neglect he received from the man for so very long. Category:Characters from the Riverlands Category:Psychopath Category:Sadists Category:Tragic characters Category:Siblings Category:Warrior